First-Person Refugee Games: Ludonarrative Strategies for Playing the Stories of Refugees and Asylum Seekers

This paper aims to offer a critical analysis of recent games by and/or about refugees, with a strong focus on the narration and reconstruction of personal experiences and biographies. We have selected three European (French and German) productions and a global one (created by UNHCR), describing the journeys refugees fleeing their country: Finding Home (UNHCR, 2017), Bury Me, My Love (Playdius Entertainment, 2017), and Path Out (Causa Creations, 2017). We also consider a fourth game: North (Outlands, 2016), an experimental cyberpunk indie game that presents well-known bureaucratic and systemic obstacles for refugees. This paper contextualizes the media representations of refugees and studies these selected games first by describing their conditions of production and communicative aims, including their intended effect on players and their calls to action (if any) beyond the act of playing. Secondly, we consider the narrative design choices they employ, in particular, their narrators and focalizers, paying attention to if and how they give voice to actual refugees. Lastly, we study the genres, goal structure, and mechanics of interaction they use, separating them in three main ludonarrative strategies: interface-based newsgames, reality-inspired interface games, lost phone newsgames, autobiographical JRPG-like, and experimental cyberpunk first person adventure. In this, we observe how these works apply the language of videogames to bridge their ludofictions to the real world stories behind them.